


a halcyon day

by TheKnittingJedi



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Beaches, Established Relationship, F/F, Flashbacks, Good AUmens AU Festival, Human AU, Ineffable Wives, Old Married Couple, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-21
Updated: 2020-06-21
Packaged: 2021-03-03 18:55:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24820438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheKnittingJedi/pseuds/TheKnittingJedi
Summary: Short and unprepossessing as Aziraphale may be, she has room enough inside her to hold them both equally, the knowledge that most of her life is already behind her and the awareness that she would change nothing, nothing, not even the bad parts.(An Ineffable Wives human AU written for the Good AUmens event, for the prompt Elders.)
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 72
Kudos: 110
Collections: Best Aziraphale and Crowley, Good AUmens AU Fest





	a halcyon day

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much to Saretton, Seekwill and TawnyOwl for their help, generosity and kindness, and to Amanda for creating the most chill and relaxing event ever.
> 
> I chose the title while rereading [_The Dry Salvages_](http://www.davidgorman.com/4quartets/3-salvages.htm), but what I didn't know is that it’s also an idiom referring to a stormless season, or a period of the past for which one is nostalgic. Which only confirms that sometimes we choose our title, sometimes the title chooses us.
> 
> Edit: now with [a wonderful watercolour](https://princip1914.tumblr.com/post/621919296480854016/ive-been-experimenting-with-watercolors-and) by Princip1914!

"When I crossed that line in my mind where I knew I was with the person that I wanted to marry, it was a very heavy thing, because you’re inviting death into your life. You know that that’s hopefully after many, many, many, many years, but the idea of death stops being abstract, because there is someone you can’t bear to lose. when it registers as true, it’s like a little shade of grief that comes in when love is its most real version. Then it contains death inside of it, and then that death contains love inside of it."

Joanna Newsom

_You are not the same people who left that station  
Or who will arrive at any terminus,  
While the narrowing rails slide together behind you;  
And on the deck of the drumming liner  
Watching the furrow that widens behind you,  
You shall not think 'the past is finished'  
Or 'the future is before us'. _

T.S. Eliot, _The Dry Salvages_

"I love you. I feel as though we were never strangers, you and I, not even for a moment."

Friedrich Nietzsche, from a letter to Mathilde Trampedach

* * *

The concrete path runs along the sea as far as the eye can see.

A long stretch of sand on the right, dried-up shrubs full of screaming cicadas that rustle in the wind on the left, the waves constantly breathing their lulling song under all of it. And Aziraphale, standing in the middle, alone, a long-sleeved caftan covering her sensitive skin from the sun that makes her short hair look as white as bleached parchment.

Their vacation is almost over. It was always bound to happen, but the knowledge doesn’t make Aziraphale less morose, doesn’t stop the sorrow from sinking its claws somewhere in her stomach, behind her ribs, where she’s softest.

It seems unfair, the way it always does, when good things come to an end.

Neither of them has acknowledged it, but last night Crowley agreed to wake up early and take a last, long walk along the beach with her without a protest.

By unspoken agreement, they made a quick detour to Saintes-Maries. An unhurried breakfast with _pain au chocolat_ and _café au lait_ waited for them at the quaint little place not far from the seafront, where they’d come every single morning for the last two weeks. 

(They never hurried anymore, even if sometimes Aziraphale woke up in the middle of the night with an aimless sense of urgency.) 

There was no conversation, but when Aziraphale sighed looking at the empty street, Crowley reached out, interlacing their fingers on the cold metal table. Aziraphale’s wedding ring pressed uncomfortably into her skin, but she didn’t move.

(Sometimes the pain is welcome. Sometimes it’s a reminder.

The promise that everything must one day end can sometimes be a solace.)

Time has a strange way of leaving its mark on Aziraphale. She has felt old since she was a little girl. She’s aged gracefully, or at least she flatters herself thinking she has. At the very least, she’s always tried her best to live with no more regrets than she can handle. She’s silent more often than not, measures each word, ponders every decision. 

She’s never been rash, not even where Crowley was concerned (where happiness was concerned).

Short and unprepossessing as she may be, she has room enough inside her to hold them both equally, the knowledge that most of her life is already behind her and the awareness that she would change nothing, nothing, not even the bad parts. 

Although sometimes the balance shifts. 

A grey hair on her wife’s head, that will soon be covered up. Her fingers aching so much that she had to give up knitting. But then Crowley would show her a new stalk on one of her orchids, or Aziraphale would turn into bed and press her face against her wife’s back, inhaling her reassuring warmth.

And the balance shifts back.

She knows that people see them together and assume they’re an old couple. And yes, they _are_ old by pretty much any standard, and they _are_ together in every way that counts, but strange as it may feel, their marriage is barely of voting age. 

Even so, Crowley has never felt like a stranger to Aziraphale. Not even when they first met, on a foggy morning in London.

They almost risked a scandal, that was true. Crowley was a senior student, not even of a different generation than Aziraphale, but a student nonetheless. Aziraphale knew that, but she allowed herself to grow fond of that contrarian, outspoken woman in the first row, third seat from the left, who asked entirely too many questions for an introductory course to modernism.

Maybe it was inevitable. Maybe it was because the idea of them becoming Something was so far from the realm of possibilities that she let her guard down. She truly believed in that impossibility, and for quite some time: after all, what could Antonia Crowley, accomplished lawyer in tailored suits, so sharply beautiful that it hurt to look at her (and Aziraphale _looked_ at her, she looked at her in the slanted sunlight coming through the huge windows of the first floor’s classroom, she looked at her in the sickly halo of the outdated halogen bulbs of her study, she looked at her always and everywhere, because how could she not), what could she see in a plain, tartan-and-tweed-clad English professor with too many books and no social skills?

The first time they met outside of the classroom was, ironically, Aziraphale's fault. She offered the class tickets for an obscure play at the National, and it was only Crowley that came around at the end of the lesson, leaning against the desk in her usual way, as if furniture was only a prop for her to rest against.

“So, those tickets. What should a student do for one of them?”

Aziraphale had been a teacher for decades by then and she knew how to hide her emotions behind a stern façade. Even so, the way her heart started beating at the idea of being with Crowley in a non-academic context was enough to give her pause. “Just ask.”

“Well, I just did.”

 _Don’t laugh._ She didn’t, but it changed nothing. “You’re pulling my leg. You’re seriously interested in an experimental unfinished play from the Thirties?”

Crowley’s outraged expression almost coaxed that laugh right back out of Aziraphale. “I would never pull anything! I’m interested.”

“Fine, but I don't want to hear a peep from you during the show. If you do, I’ll make you write an essay.”

Crowley mimed zipping her lips.

She talked throughout the show, just as Aziraphale knew she would. 

The unexpected variable was how little Aziraphale minded her commentary. And, the next week, when she found a six-page essay about _The Mountain Giants_ in her inbox, she actually laughed.

* * *

“What are you thinking about?” 

They were making their way out of the café to the road that ran along the shoreline, under the Camargue sun. Aziraphale hadn’t said anything, but Crowley had always known how to tell her silences apart.

Aziraphale squeezed her hand. “First date.”

“The Barbican?”

Aziraphale shook her head. “The National.”

“Oooh, _first_ date.” Aziraphale could hear the smile in her wife’s voice even without looking at her. “Feeling nostalgic, today, are we?”

There it was again, the aimless urgency, the unnamed fear. Aziraphale had the sudden need to be closer to Crowley, and she linked their arms together. She didn’t say anything — there was nothing to say — but Crowley heard her nonetheless, and gave her hand a few fond pats.

They walked that way until the wind snatched Aziraphale’s hat away. It’s an old, silly thing she wears when she reads or does her crosswords on the lawn chair while Crowley tends to her garden, and she rarely brings it out of the house.

If Aziraphale has always been an old woman at heart, Crowley’s nothing less than a force of nature. Outspoken, unafraid, always running around and expecting the world to bend at her will, always missing a safe place for herself. As soon as she understood that, Aziraphale longed to provide her with it. If only it was something she could do.

(She lives in constant fear. It's always lurking, each year more shameless in the way it pushes its way to the forefront of her thoughts, all the uglier the more Aziraphale tries to ignore it. The fear that each time will be the last. The fear of an empty chair at the table (hers or Crowley's, it doesn't matter).) 

For the longest time, Aziraphale had no idea what Crowley was doing in her classroom, and every time she asked her, the woman would give a different reply. She eventually gathered enough information to understand that the posh London law firm she worked for insisted she needed to integrate her degree with some credits in policy innovation or life sciences or something equally incomprehensible for Aziraphale. They needed her to do it to comply with some new regulation or another, even if retirement was less than a decade away. Aziraphale knew that because her colleagues told her when she asked and she had no reason to doubt them. They paid for a whole semester of classes, and apparently Crowley decided to follow as many courses as she could, and if she had no time to work on her cases, that was her bosses’ problem. Aziraphale knew _that_ because she had eyes and ears.

Things started to change on a late spring night, as they were walking out of a play. (Aziraphale offered her theatre tickets to the whole classroom once or twice more, but since Crowley was the only one who always took her up on the offer, it had soon become an arrangement between the two of them.

It was fine. Nothing to feel guilty about.)

“We should go grab a drink,” Crowley said.

“Oh.” Aziraphale’s feet were suddenly glued to the ground and she stopped. “Oh, I can't. I would love to,” she stammered, hoping against hope that the lights in the Barbican’s foyer weren’t bright enough to show her blushing. “I’d be lying if I said I don’t want to. But… you understand.”

Crowley turned around, her brow knitted. She was a few steps ahead of Aziraphale and looked blessedly unaware of her turmoil. “I… don't?” 

She was looking at Aziraphale over the rim of her glasses. She never wore them in class, for some reason, and Aziraphale had started to suspect Crowley didn’t always sit in the first row just to harangue her better.

But there it was, finally: the unpleasantness addressed. Aziraphale had hoped it would never come to that, or at least not in public, with people walking and talking all around them, as if the world hadn’t just shifted a little bit to the left, and Aziraphale didn’t know how to put it back. “You _understand_ ,” she repeated. How could she make it clearer without showing her hand (her entire heart)? “I'm your professor.”

Crowley’s eyes widened then, and her unfairly beautiful mouth opened. “Oh, you thought I was asking you out!” Her delighted tone made Aziraphale silently beg the ground to open up and swallow her. “Isn't that a little presumptuous, Professor Fell?”

Once the first wave of embarrassment retired, Crowley’s gentle teasing brought Aziraphale back to her senses. It was _Crowley_ , she was safe. She had shown her a hundred times that she could handle Aziraphale and all that came with her — the prickliness, the fastidiousness, the blunders, the reticence, the old-fashioned ways. “Oh, do shut up,” she said, with the barest hint of a smile. “And stop flattering yourself.”

Smiling back unapologetically, Crowley raised her hands. She was giving her time to decide, and Aziraphale used that time to listen closely to herself. _I know what I want_ , she realised. Of course she knew that Crowley wasn’t really asking her out (what a notion), it would _not_ be a date (she couldn’t even breathe around the word, it was not _allowed_ ), but she wanted to spend time together without the excuse of the theatre, and Aziraphale wanted that too, and what was wrong with it? It was not like it would lead anywhere, if Aziraphale had a say in the matter ( _don’t think about it, this way only lays heartbreak_ ).

Looking back, there wasn’t a specific moment when things _started_ to change. There hadn’t been a specific word, or a sentence, that had changed the course of their relationship. No abrupt steering, just a handful of gentle adjustments.

“I don’t see what could be wrong with just a glass of wine,” she said, slowly.

Subtle pushes. Soft-spoken suggestions. A ridge of moraine where a glacier had relentlessly pushed forward detritus, one century after another.

By the time they called it a night, they had bought and finished two bottles of wine, and if they were both a little bleary-eyed and sensitive to loud noises during the next day's lecture, neither of them mentioned it.

* * *

Aziraphale hadn’t even realised she’d lost her hat to the wind, and Crowley was taking off her sandals, handing them to her. “Take these, angel.” And she was off on the beach, running, before Aziraphale could reply.

The stretch of sand between the concrete path and the sea is undulated, the dunes lined with low wooden fences. It’s beautiful and haunting, in a forsaken sort of way. There’s something lunar about the way the white expanse is so vast that it feels they’re the only people on Earth.

In the past two weeks, Aziraphale has walked on every inch of this beach, or so it feels, by herself or with Crowley, and yet she can’t shake the feeling that she’s missing something. 

Tomorrow they will be back home, in their cottage, the culmination of their retirement plans. Aziraphale cannot say life hasn’t been good in the last decade. Life has never been hard for her, not really: she’s never been hungry or cold, she received the best education money could buy, she was a tenured professor for most of her academic career. An only child, and a precocious one, she grew into a methodical woman who valued and protected her independence. She loved doing research and mostly tolerated her classes as a necessary evil.

Crowley was not her first love, but a part of her knew from the beginning that she was going to be her last. She’d always despised compromise, and every relationship she had was tentative and unconvinced, ending the moment it demanded something from her that she didn’t want to give.

And it’s not always easy, being married. But nothing that Crowley wants from her has ever been too much to give. For the first time, love didn’t feel like a sacrifice.

Sometimes she’s not sure she deserves it.

Where has the wind taken her silly straw hat? She should have told Crowley to leave it, that it doesn’t matter, and now she can’t see her anymore.

There’s a stubbornness in the way bodies keep working when we don’t pay attention to them. She’s never particularly cared for anything except her brain, Aziraphale, and now she realises how much that has changed. She’s grateful for the way her legs are still strong enough to keep pace. Her fingers can brush dusty pages and her wife’s hair with the same reverence. She cleans her glasses often, even if she knows the book by memory, so she can watch Crowley planting seeds and pruning branches while Aziraphale reads aloud to her.

She waits.

If there’s something she’s used to, it’s waiting.

And her Crowley knows how to wait, too, even better than her. Aziraphale thought she was steady, but in truth she’s only ever been slow. Crowley is the real Polaris, patient and steadfast and true. And at the same time she’s the force that moves them.

Aziraphale closes her eyes while her senses all mix up together in a rush that threatens to overwhelm her. She breathes in the sunlight and feels the waves on her tongue as they crash on the invisible shore. The cicadas are screaming under her skin. And underneath the cicadas and the wind and the waves and the blood pulsing in her temples, there’s stillness. A fixed point she can almost reach…

At last, a muffled string of profanities draws closer and closer. Aziraphale opens her eyes. The still point vanishes. 

Barefoot and out of breath, Crowley reaches her on the path. “There’s your hat.” 

Aziraphale drinks her greedily in. Once her head is covered again, she notices the hems of Crowley’s trousers are wet. “Did you go very far?”

Crowley takes her time answering, adjusting the scarf that covers her head. Aziraphale catches a glimpse of red hair, perfectly dyed. She’s always found her wife’s vanity deeply endearing, and the determination with which she covers every single grey hair very amusing.

“I just dipped in for a moment.” She takes her sandals back and grips Aziraphale’s arm for balance while she puts them back on. “Water’s nice and cool.”

Aziraphale covers her hand with her own. _Thank you._

There’s the ghost of a crooked smile there, on that beautiful, angular face Aziraphale knows far better than her own. She wants to trace the lines around her mouth with her finger. She doesn’t.

They haven’t taken a dozen steps along the path that Crowley squeezes her arm again. “A break?”

Aziraphale turns towards her. “Here?”

Crowley shrugs indifferently. Too indifferently. She saunters off the path, to where a shrub-covered dune offers a bit of shadow, plunks down and takes off her sandals again.

Trying to keep her hesitations at bay, Aziraphale follows her. It’s still early. They don’t have to leave until the afternoon. And even then, they’re too old to run after their connections, so their train tickets are flexible.

There’s a part of Aziraphale that anticipates turning the key into the lock of her house, breathing in the musty darkness before the shutters are opened again, burrowing herself back into the safety of her well-trodden everyday life.

“It was raining,” Crowley says, gently taking her out of her reverie. She has her eyes closed, but Aziraphale knows that she can feel her questioning look. “On our first date.”

Aziraphale frowns, trying to pick the right picture from the album, and is briefly overwhelmed by gratitude when she realises there are so many. “The Barbican?”

“The National. You covered me with your umbrella. Which was too small, and we ended up both soaked.”

That’s true, Aziraphale had forgotten. She huffs, but she’s smiling. “You should have known better than to leave yours at home.”

“But I didn’t forget.” Crowley turns towards her, and yes, the crooked smile is back into place. “I knew you’d have one, and it was an excuse to get close to you.”

“Well, that’s very improper.” Aziraphale gives in to the pointless impulse of scooting farther. 

Crowley’s laugh is of the mocking, affectionate sort. The one that says, _you’re ridiculous, but I’m not going anywhere._ “We’re married, angel.”

“Well, we weren’t _then_.”

In those days, if someone had told her they would laugh about it together in a few years, Aziraphale would have probably replied with something strongly-worded. Growing closer to Crowley didn’t hurt only because Aziraphale refused to put a label to what they were both, in hindsight, clearly doing.

As the end of the semester approached, Aziraphale steadfastly ignored the knowledge that they soon wouldn’t be teacher and student anymore. The thought clamored and pushed to get to the forefront of her mind. She pushed it back, every time.

Then the exams were done and over with. Aziraphale handed Crowley — the last student to come by her desk — her final essay, and couldn’t help from rolling her eyes when her pupil saw the mark at the top of the page and smirked in satisfaction.

And that was it. That should have been the end. Aziraphale just had to let go, to wait for Crowley to waltz out of her life, maybe be thankful for the memories and the company.

But Crowley didn’t leave. She just looked at her.

The silence was smothering Aziraphale. It was Something, Crowley was telling her Something, but she couldn’t hear (she wouldn’t). How could she, when her own heartbeat was so deafening, when her hands were clammy with fear and desire, and so, so empty?

“What are your plans, now?” she asked, hoping it would be enough to break the spell, to bring them back to a more tolerable form of existing with each other. To reset boundaries.

But Crowley shook her head. She was done with Aziraphale being slow. “Ask me again,” she said.

Aziraphale was dizzy, because of the heat or because the world was again tilting differently, she didn’t want to know. She couldn’t help it: she clung to the world as it was, even as it crumpled. “What are…”

“That’s not what I meant.” There was no urgency in Crowley’s voice, but she was leaning over Aziraphale’s desk, her final paper crumpled in her hand. “Why I took your course. Ask me again.”

 _Maybe later_ , Aziraphale answered in her mind. _Give me just a moment to settle, to prepare. You’ve led me here, to this overwhelming question that I don’t know how to ask, that I don’t know the words of._

But she did. All she had to do was to repeat them.

Crowley was offering her both the question and the answer. All Aziraphale had to do was to pluck them from her hands.

“Why?” she breathed, barely loud enough to hear herself.

The whisper hadn’t yet left her mouth that Crowley answered: “For you.” She smiled, one of those tight-lipped things Aziraphale had thought she’d have to forfeit from then on. “Let’s have dinner.”

Aziraphale takes her wife’s hand, she looks at the profile she knows by heart, the lips she can recite as a poem, the ears that have listened to her deepest, most shameful fears over the years.

This is her home, too. How silly of her to forget.

As the sun gets higher, they get moving again. But Aziraphale is ever so slow, she’s always been, so it takes her a few minutes before she notices. “My darling, did you burn your feet?”

Crowley just shrugs, but Aziraphale is fluent in her body language. The vise around her heart tightens a little bit more.

“It’s nothing,” Crowley says, noticing her expression, but Aziraphale is already crouching in front of her. “What are you doing?”

“What does it look like?” Aziraphale snarks, having learned how to do that from the best teacher.

“No, you’re…” Crowley sputters. “Aziraphale, you can’t.”

“I can.” And she does: she is old and slow but she’s strong, and her wife weighs as much as a stick, and a lean one at that. She wouldn’t hesitate even if she weren’t sure that she could do it.

_You’ve carried me up until now, you still do. Let me carry you, this once._

She knows Crowley can hear her, the way she often seems to hear Aziraphale’s thoughts before she can find the right words to wrap them up with. “Fine,” she spits out. “But you stop the moment it becomes too much.”

(“I’ll stop, if it’s too much,” says a slightly younger Crowley that lives in Aziraphale’s memory, perfectly preserved. “Just tell me, and I’ll stop.” 

Aziraphale had thrown her head back on the pillow, holding her heart between her teeth and her lover’s head between her legs. “Don’t stop.”)

* * *

The promise that everything must one day end can sometimes be a solace.

Crowley is not the only one who’s always had too many questions. Aziraphale’s are just buried deeper. _Am I enough? Have I held you back? Are you sure?_ She knows it’s safe to ask them, yet something has always held them back in her throat, until she grew so used to the choking sensation that she didn’t mind it anymore. What if the balance shifts too much? What if there’s no coming back from the question?

Aziraphale cannot carry Crowley for long without resting. Here they are, sitting side by side on the sand again. There’s no hurry, Aziraphale keeps saying to herself, as she remembers laying in the dim light of a distant morning, matching her breath with a sleeping, exhausted Crowley’s, the moment she suddenly knew the answer to her oldest question.

_It’s now. The moment you were always reaching for, the one you feared had escaped you a long time ago. It’s now._

Covering her mouth, Aziraphale had silently cried away her fears.

_It’s not too late._

* * *

This story has always been about endings, as most stories are.

But not yet.

 _This is the moment_ , Aziraphale thinks, remembering. _It still is._ She breathes in. _And this moment._ She looks at Crowley. _And this one._

Soon — sooner than later, at any rate — there will be no more moments. But they have this one. And this one.

After a minute, Crowley looks back. “You okay?”

A seagull flies overhead, tilting in the wind that has just become stronger, fighting against it, adjusting its wings and crying.

How much time is left for them on these shores, in the cottage at the end of the lane? Even if time feels frozen, it always moves forward. A hundred hours until they reach terminus. Or maybe a thousand.

Aziraphale grasps the moment a while longer, and then lets it go. She watches it fly away, and she’s grateful.

“Let’s go home,” she says.

**Author's Note:**

>  _La plage de l'Espiguette_ is a real place that I've only seen from afar once, a wind-swept, vast stretch of sand that truly feels like another planet.
> 
> Thank you for reading! Come say hi on [Tumblr!](https://mllekurtz.tumblr.com/)


End file.
